Hiring your first staff engineer

The first staff engineer hire fails more often than any other senior hire I have watched. Not because the person is wrong, but because the company has not yet decided what the role is for.

A staff engineer is leverage on decisions, not on output. Before opening the role, write down the three technical decisions that are currently stuck. If you cannot fill in all three, hire another senior engineer instead and revisit in six months.

The interview that works

Skip the system design theatre. Bring the candidate one of your actual stuck decisions, with the real constraints, and spend an hour on it. You are looking for three things: whether they ask about the constraint you did not mention, whether they name a cheaper option than the one you came in with, and whether the engineer sitting next to you wants to keep talking afterwards.

Everything else — the coding screen, the values round — is a filter. This hour is the decision.